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| Now, this is a pizza that deserves to be called a vegetable. |
The media has been buzzing this week about Congress declaring pizza a vegetable. But in
fact, pizza was already a vegetable for purposes of the school lunch program; all Congress did was, at the behest of lobbyists for Schwan and ConAgra,
block the Obama Administration from requiring the school lunch program to conform with actual USDA definitions of what counts as a vegetable serving.
By Linda Felaco
Note that we're not talking about pizza that has vegetables as toppings. We're talking plain old cheese or pepperoni pizza, the kinds that are mass
marketed to school lunch programs.
The two tablespoons of tomato paste on a slice of pizza are considered a vegetable serving, making a slice of pizza a reimbursable meal for the
manufacturers of school lunches. Obama, socialist moonbat*
that he is, thought there should be a half-cup of tomato paste on the pizza for it to count as a standard half-cup serving of vegetable. He wasn't even
proposing putting actual vegetables on the pizza. But this change would have cut into the profit margins of Schwan and ConAgra. So no can do.
As you might recall, a similar scenario played out last month when Obama wanted to limit the number of tater tots that can be fed to kids at school.
Note that
potatoes have been shown to cause more weight gain than soda or red meat. Yet before you could do "one potato, two potato …,"
senators from potato-growing states made sure kids can continue to be served tater tots daily.
And of course on the other side of the congressional gravy train, there's the pharmacomedical industrial complex, which profits from epidemic rates of
obesity. Heck, Lipitor and other cholesterol-lowering drugs are selling better than crack cocaine. So it's not in the pharmaceutical industry's
interest for kids to be served more nutritious meals, either.
And when you factor in mass advertising and positioning—those damn golden arches are always right in the middle of the most heavily trafficked areas,
never on side streets—is it any wonder Americans keep getting fatter and fatter? Then there's all that MSG, which is literally addictive. A dietitian
once told me MSG in essence gives your taste buds little orgasms, and eating foods that contain it gets you so accustomed to that level of stimulation
that after a while, you can't even taste food that doesn't have MSG in it. So you keep going back, like a crack addict.
So am I denying the role of personal responsibility in people's eating habits? Absolutely not. No one kidnaps you and takes you to Wendy's and
force-feeds you "Dave's Hot 'N Juicy."
All I'm saying is that if you were trying to design a system where public health was at a minimum and corporate profits were at a maximum, I think it
would look a lot like what we have now.
*
Written with tongue firmly in cheek.